State v. Sharpe

Citations

• 353 Conn. 564

Syllabus

Convicted of multiple counts of kidnapping in the first degree in connection with four separate incidents that occurred in 1984, the defendant appealed to this court. During each incident, an unknown assailant robbed and sexually assaulted a woman in her home. The cases remained unresolved until 2020, when law enforcement received information tending to implicate the defen- dant. Thereafter, the police lawfully collected the defendant's trash from in front of his residence, which included a belt. The police then, acting without a search warrant, submitted the belt to the state forensic laboratory for testing. Analysts used DNA extracted from the belt to conduct a short tandem repeat analysis and determined that that DNA was a contributor to an unknown DNA profile that had been generated from certain items recov- ered from the four crime scenes. The police then obtained a search warrant to collect a confirmatory sample of the defendant's DNA, which established that the defendant was the likely source of the crime scene DNA. After the presentation of evidence at the defendant's trial, the court instructed the jury on the elements of the kidnapping charges in accordance with this court's decision in State v. Salamon (287 Conn. 509), including the six factors that the jury should consider in determining whether the defendant had intended to restrain the victims beyond the degree necessary to commit the underlying crimes. The following day, the court provided the jury with a flowchart outlining the elements of the kidnapping charges as a visual guide to its previous instructions, but the flowchart omitted any reference to the Salamon factors. On appeal, the defendant claimed that the warrantless extraction and testing of the DNA from his discarded belt constituted an unreasonable search and seizure in violation of his rights under the fourth amendment to the United States constitution and article first, § 7, of the Connecticut constitution, and that the omission of the S